There are, I believe, no remains in Membich of the temple of Atergatis which Crassus spoiled, and even at Karkhemish there is nothing but a mound unopened and kept closed by the Turks, to show where a great goddess, probably the greatest goddess of ancient times, was worshipped. In reading the histories of Chaldea, Syria, Canaan, the Hittites, Israelites, Phœnicians, and Greeks, there appears as the chief goddess in their mythology always a goddess of victory, or love, and it is interesting to trace the course of this deity through the religions of the ancient East. The Chaldean race, which inhabited the lowlands, at the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris, from ages far beyond our knowledge, had, from earliest times set up a goddess, “Belit,” the lady, and it is from her that the later goddesses of other nations, or rather the later names and worship, sprang. It is now known that the Hittites (for whose history the world is indebted to the wonderful research of Professor Sayce) were an extraordinarily powerful nation, that held the lands of Syria from about 3700 B.C.[4] to 700 B.C., when the Assyrians overcame them. During this period they came into contact with the civilisation of Babylon, and, long before the appearance of the Syrians as a nation, probably adopted the worship of Belit or Ishtar (the same deity), whose name they altered to Atergatis. The worship of Atergatis was general among the peoples of Canaan (Syria), under the name of Ashtoreth, or Ashtaroth as we find it in the Bible. [Sidenote: BEL AND ASHTORETH] The Canaanitic mythology also supplied a fundamental idea of male and female essence in Baal and Ashtaroth, with whom we are familiarised by the Bible stories; and this idea of the origin of fecundity and power, Baal, the God of all the living principles, according to the Canaanitic peoples, was the deity after whom the Israelites so often strayed; and Ashtaroth, the goddess of motherhood, love, and sensuality, necessarily was coupled with him. Baal or Bel, or Moloch, the Sun-god, or Dagon, are all names of the same god, according to different tribes and peoples, who adopted this, probably the earliest conception of any worship of the supernatural arising from reverence of the sun and moon as the emblems of day and night, fire and moisture, heat and cold, light and dark, life and death, as twin gods of these antithetic phenomena--in short, the symbols of existence at all. So we find the goddess Ishtar worshipped by the Phœnicians as Ashtoreth, by the Hittites as Atergatis, by the Philistines and Canaanites as Derketo, the fish-goddess (whose emblem and likeness was that of a half-woman, half-fish, as that of Dagon, the god, was that of a fish-man). It was of course to these that the high places whereon they erected “Asherah,” or places of adoration, were dedicated, and against them that the prophets of Israel were sent.